Shouldn't a retailer's online store inventory system actually work?

Flickr photo by greencollander/CC LicenseReplacing a dead air conditioner wasn't as easy as it should be, thanks to a major retailer's dud of an inventory system.

One of our window air conditioners picked this week to go belly up. Nice timing! In searching online, we first identified a replacement that had good customer reviews. Then we searched to see what retailer had the best price. This is all pretty standard stuff in today’s shopping world, as is being able to check to see online if the store you’ve picked has units in stock.

The going rate for the 12,000 BTU Frigidaire unit we were seeking seemed to be $299, but we did find one retailer who was offering it for $287. Not a big savings, but still enough to pay most of the sales tax. Their web site’s store inventory system showed that they had nine units available in one local store and four were available at another nearby location.

So off we went to the nearest store, which was supposed to have four units on hand. Alas,, they had none. And the salesperson said it didn’t make sense to go to the other store because the online inventory feature was notoriously unreliable. “If it says anything under 12, it doesn’t mean anything,” he warned us.

Fortunately, he showed us another well-reviewed model priced at $299, and given that we had relied on their unreliable inventory system, he would sell it to us at the $287 price we were seeking. Because they gave us the lower price, I’m not going to trash them by naming the retailer here other than to specify that it was a national chain.

However, I will trash the notion that you can give consumers the impression that you have an actual working online store inventory system when clearly you do not. Nowhere on the retailer’s site did it warn that in-stock quantities might be erroneous and that you should call to double-check before going to the store. We’ve done enough such purchases to know that some retailers’ store inventory systems actually are accurate so it didn’t cross our minds that a company this big could be so far behind its competitors.

In today’s competitive retailing world, customer service is paramount. Thank goodness the salesperson in this case was empowered to do right by us on the price. But it still leaves a bad impression about the company and their ability to provide the same quality of service these we have gotten in the past from their rivals.

I’m sure online store inventory systems are not cheap. But neither is annoying customers by having a system that is completely unreliable.